Lightroom 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and CC Performance Comparison

Ever since I started using Lightroom back in 2007, I have been keeping a backup of every single version on my computer, making sure that I had the latest version of that particular release. With the very first version of Lightroom having a few issues and not having 64-bit architecture support, I ended up deleting it, so the first release of Lightroom I actually preserved was Lightroom 2 (the latest build of that release was Lightroom 2.7). The next stable build I preserved was Lightroom 3.6. From there, it was Lightroom 4.4 that I used the most before Adobe released Lightroom 5. With the release of LR 5, Adobe introduced Lightroom CC, which was the first cloud version of Lightroom. From there, Lightroom CC 2014 was rolled out, which was equivalent to version 5.4 of LR standalone. The big release was Lightroom 6 (CC 2015), which is the most current version, the latest release being Lightroom 6.6.1, or Lightroom CC 2015.6.1 if you use the cloud version of the software. So what do you do when you have all these versions of the software? Well, I installed them all on my Windows 10 PC and decided to give them all a try and see how much Adobe has been improving the performance of the software over the years. The results are quite interesting to say the least!

What I decided to do, is see how fast each version of Lightroom imports images, generates 1:1 previews and exports images. With each new release, Adobe promises better stability and performance improvements. So how do we test this and compare the results? Due to potential camera compatibility issues, I converted a total of 823 images from their native RAW format to Adobe’s DNG format from my 2012 Lightroom catalog. This way, I did not have to worry about using cameras that are compatible with Lightroom 2. Images were mixed from different cameras such as Nikon D800, D4 and Df. During the import process, I set up the import dialog to add images into a brand new catalog for each release, then start the process of building 1:1 previews right after the import is complete:

Nostalgia: Lightroom 2 Import Dialog

For the export process, I only exported a total of 250 images, since it was enough of a sample to test the length of the process. Images were extracted in smaller resolution, 2048 pixels long, with JPEG quality set to 100% and export sharpening set to “Screen” and “High”.

I used my phone’s timer to see how long the first and the second process would take. I repeated everything 3 times and averaged out the numbers for the table you see below.

Computer Specifications

For these tests, I used my PC that has Windows 10 64-bit OS installed. It is not my latest Skylake build, but I still use this machine quite a bit, so I decided to use it instead. Also, realistically, many of our readers are probably not going to have the “latest and greatest” in terms of computer architecture, so showing results from an older build would probably be more relevant:

The machine has 32 GB of RAM and the two drives I used for this test were 240 GB Intel SSD 530 series. I put Lightroom catalog and previews on my OS drive, while the images were located in the second SSD drive. The main folder containing all images was about 20.7 GB in size.

Let’s now take a look at the numbers and see how the different builds compare in terms of performance:

Lightroom Version

Image Import

1:1 Previews

Image Export

Images were exported in down-sampled resolution of 2048 pixels long

Lightroom 2.7

00:00:35

00:21:39

00:06:17

Lightroom 3.6

00:00:21

00:27:03

00:06:47

Lightroom 4.4

00:00:15

00:43:05

00:08:35

Lightroom 5.7

00:00:17

00:41:39

00:08:15

Lightroom 6.6.1 / CC 2015.6.1

00:00:20

00:47:32

00:06:16

As you can see, the results of my research are quite interesting. Lightroom 2.7 was quite slow when adding images to a catalog, averaging around 35 seconds when importing 823 images. Lightroom 3.6 was a bit better in that regard, but the real performance improvement for importing images into a catalog was introduced in Lightroom 4, which cut the import time in half when compared to LR 2. From there, the import time stayed roughly the same, with the latest 6.6.1 / CC 2015.6.1 release slowing down slightly, most likely due to added complexity of Lightroom catalog structure and added features.

However, the key difference in performance is NOT the import time. Take a look at the second column, which represents the generation of 1:1 previews. In version 2.7, Lightroom was able to build previews for 823 images very quickly, averaging around 21 minutes. From there, everything pretty much went downhill – Lightroom 3.6 slowed down to 27 minutes, while Lightroom 4.4 onward slowed the process down significantly, adding a lot more time to the process. The latest version of Lightroom showed pretty disappointing figures, averaging around 47 minutes to generate the same previews.

On the bright side, the export process has been slightly improved in the latest version of Lightroom, bringing the numbers back to what they used to be back in the LR2 and LR3 days. Another important point to bring up, is that one can really speed up the export process by running a few export jobs simultaneously.

CPU Usage

An interesting fact that I discovered while running the different versions of Lightroom, is that every version seemed to utilize all available CPU cores and threads, as shown below:

However, overall CPU usage seemed to vary from LR2 to LR6/CC. Lightroom 3 used to eat up between 60-75% of CPU when building previews, whereas the later versions seemed to be capping around the 50% mark. When exporting images, CPU usage spiked up higher, especially when running multiple exports.

RAM Usage

In terms of RAM usage, LR2 and LR3 averaged around 2 GB, going up as high as 2.2 GB of RAM consumption during CPU-intensive jobs. However, starting from Lightroom 4, RAM usage went up pretty significantly. LR 4 and LR 5 seemed to eat up between 3.3 and 4.2 GB of RAM on average, whereas the latest version of Lightroom seemed to be a bit more RAM-hungry when running exactly the same process, averaging 4.5 GB of RAM of usage.

It is important to note that both CPU and RAM usage varied greatly depending on the job. When stitching panoramas, for example, CPU usage could climb up to 100% and RAM usage could take up 10+ GB of RAM, depending on the size of the panorama. Both CPU and RAM usage come down significantly after the jobs complete.

RAM Clean Up

Adobe is known for its memory leaks in software, which sometimes end up consuming much more RAM than needed, especially when re-running the same RAM-intensive process. For example, when one just launches Lightroom 6 / CC, the initial RAM usage is very low (on my PC, it is around 380 MB). However, as I work within Lightroom and start editing images, RAM usage can climb up to several gigabytes and just stay there, until Lightroom is shut down and re-opened. While some of this extra RAM usage could be related to process caching for more fluid Lightroom operation, sometimes leaks can be quite significant. I have seen patterns in the past, where Lightroom would eat up too much RAM after I stitched a few panoramas, eventually giving me errors, forcing me to shut down and reopen Lightroom.

Conclusion

For a number of years, Adobe has been actively pushing Lightroom as the ultimate all-in-one post-processing tool for hobbyists, enthusiasts and professionals. Without a doubt, it is a very capable software package that has many advantages over other similar tools on the market. However, it seems like with each new feature Adobe adds to Lightroom, it adds more layers of complexity to the software, which can result in slower overall performance with each new release. As can be seen from the above chart, Lightroom has been slowing down significantly from its early releases in terms of 1:1 image preview generation, making it a much less desirable tool for image culling. For this reason alone, I have permanently switched from Lightroom to FastRawViewer, as I no longer have to wait for hours for my computer to generate image previews, when I can do it instantly from my memory card.

At the same time, Adobe certainly has done a good job in making sure that both image import and image export processes are highly optimized, giving us excellent performance when compared to other software packages on the market. We have already provided our detailed post-processing software comparison, where Adobe Lightroom ranked overall #1 for both RAW and DNG image export. And when it comes to providing both post-processing and solid file management capabilities, very few software packages can compete with Lightroom at this time, putting Lightroom ahead of the game.

I hope Adobe works harder to provide properly tested and optimized software going forward. We have seen pretty disappointing Lightroom updates that had to be either recalled or fixed (remember the Lightroom 6.2 / CC 2015.2 update that replaced the import screen and introduced bad crashing bugs? Adobe had to issue a public apology as a result of this release failure), which only happens due to inadequate testing and poor QA before final release.

I would like to see Adobe refresh the development of Lightroom from grounds up, similar to what Microsoft did with the introduction of Windows 2000, after failing with Windows ME and other buggy releases in the past. Instead of adding layers and layers of complexity with each new release, which seem to make it worse in identifying particular bugs (especially the good old menu bug, which Adobe has no idea how to fully fix), Adobe’s development team should write a solid base code, then make everything else modular, so that it loads on-demand. This should allow the software to consume less computer resources and make it easier to end processes that are no longer used. In addition, Adobe should seriously pay attention to how GPU is used in Lightroom – I think there is significant room for improvement there. I have a pretty powerful GPU and yet even my most powerful PC seems to struggle with running Lightroom smoothly, which should not be the case. Many photographers end up turning off GPU acceleration, since they have more issues and slowdowns with that feature turned on.

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About Nasim Mansurov

Nasim Mansurov is the author and founder of Photography Life, based out of Denver, Colorado. He is recognized as one of the leading educators in the photography industry, conducting workshops, producing educational videos and frequently writing content for Photography Life. You can follow him on Instagram, 500px and Facebook. Read more about Nasim here.

Reader Interactions

Comments

1) D.A.Wagner

September 3, 2016 at 1:49 pm

Nasim, Having been an early adopter of Lr, I’ve never thought to do this, so thanks for investing your time to create this up-to-date comparison of the various versions of Lightroom since version 2.

Robust as LIghtroom has become over the years with current version 2015.6.1, the Adobe Beta testers are constantly asking, “why can’t Lightroom run faster?” for importing and making previews – especially with images that contain a significant amount of development work. And since Lr takes considerably more time to import and generation of previews, I see many professionals making the same move as you have to FastRawViewer or PhotoMechanic. You’d think Adobe would make this a priority. But, alas, they have not…

Adobe has no incentive to fundamentally improve Lr since moving to a subscription model. I got v5.7 for free with a $150 purchase of a refurb Nikon J1 and have no intention of ever going CC. I’m also holding steady with Photoshop CS6 where development under CC has similarly ground to a halt and new versions are only bug fixes.

I’m still with LR 5 with pleasure. No failed at all, ever. So little change with LR 6, and i don’t want to pay $US10 per month or $120.00 for the CC. I don’t want to be prisoner. I’m not commercial. Affinity Photo, Perfect Photo suite, Google Nik (free) does the job perfectly without paying to much and nothing monthly.

Justin, GPU acceleration does nothing for importing, generating previews and exporting images. It is used for specific functionality within the Develop module. Still, I went ahead and disabled GPU acceleration on all versions that support it in order to compare them directly. I have just tried to enable GPU acceleration in LR CC and it did not affect the result – the numbers are roughly the same.

I have been using Lightroom and Capture One for the past year. At the end of this month I will be cancelling my Lightroom subscription and staying with Capture One. It is faster, has better file management, more flexible editing and is just a total better application than Lightroom.

Bill, I love the editing capabilities of Capture One Pro, however, I cannot agree with you on file management. Capture One does not even have a robust database in order to keep all images in the same place (it is recommended to keep a separate catalog for each shoot). I hope Capture One development team makes a change to the software, making it a bit more robust for proper file management.

Hi Nasim, (With all due respect) I would disagree with your recommendation to keep a separate catalog for each shoot, unless you have mastered the Lightroom Import/Library setup and understand how to properly manage/move your files. ICP teaches this way and is responsible for about a third of my new clients. Accomplished photographers and professionals working for the likes of NatGeo and the Washington Post get totally baffled by the Lr catalog protocols. It’s pretty easy to do since almost no one reads the Lr manual before getting started – it just looks so simple…

I’ve reorganized and repaired over a hundred Lr Libraries over the past 7 years as an Adobe Certified Lr Instructor and Expert, and catalog mismanagement is the number one issue that new clients hire me to solve. The recommendation I make for everyone other than seasoned Lightroom professionals is, one catalog for all your files, everything imported by year into month/date folders and, after the import, those folders are given a descriptive name after the date to identify them. And, of course, daily backup of all photos, not just the catalog.

A couple of examples of issues I have seen: 1. Clients with dozens of catalogs who cannot find images because images appear in two different catalogs and images in one catalog have been moved, rendering the second catalog’s images missing 2. Catalogs on multiple hard drives – one for each shoot with a catalog on each and eventually the client cannot determine what catalog is which drive. 3.The list goes on and one, but you get my point.

Once a client has a handle on the Lightroom Import/Library protocols and has a sense of asset management, they can set up anyway they wish. But until then, a single catalog is always my recommendation.

A unique and very interesting ‘test’ Nasim, good work! I am a LR user since the first public beta and I am still using the software but not on subscription basis, so 5.7 is my version.

I do have a few observations to make. I too have noticed that the 1:1 preview rendering has slowed down considerably in all those years, but I do think that the development module has improved in quality dramatically over the years. The main reason that I still use LR as my main tool is that (after 1:1 rendering) all the editable parameter changes are shown INSTANTLY. I never have to wait for any of the adjustments that I am making. There is no other image editing software in my experience that has this ‘realtime’ feeling. And I am ‘developing’ 14-bit D800 NEF files, so they are huge! Change the noise reduction setting? It’s there! If I do the same thing in Topaz Denoise it takes up to a minute (although it sometimes gives you better result I admit). In other words, I think Adobe puts in some hooks during rendering that makes the further-on editing so snappy….. Oh, and I noticed that importing on my (older) 2.2Ghz quad-core i7 MBpro is TWICE as fast as on my newer 2.8 Ghz dual-core i5 MBPro, both machines using the same OS…..

Interesting comparison, but in a such a way worthless because when you used LR 2 you were unable to get an i7 and 32GB of RAM. Your comparison takes all versions with rhe same computer. Anyway I must concede that if you got better performance with an state od the aer processor, one must conclude thar gain was much more significative.

@ nestor – for any design of experiments only one variable at a time should be changed. So in this case it is valid to use all versions of the software on the same computer. We are after all trying to understand the progression or regression of Lightroom and not computing power.

Nasim, the Capture One file management allows me to keep all photos in one database, similar to Aperture. I have also used it using multiple catalogues, similar to Lightroom but I don’t like this method.

Bill, from my understanding, Capture One is not optimized to handle large catalogs. I shoot between 45-60 thousand images per year. I have tried more than 10K images in a Capture One catalog and had problems – I don’t think it can handle everything I have got…

Thank you Nasim for the sum of work provided here and the excellent synthesis.

Yes, to me Lightroom is a beautiful software, still plagued with poor software development, just as many other Adobe products unfortunately. We have to make sure that the competition stays open, because the approach that Adobe takes is more and more to take the profits and leave the customer base with the frustrations.

I have a question. If a person is going to move to lightroom for the first time would it be best to purchase a download of version 6 or version 5. I have read that individuals that got a downloaded purchased copy of Lightroom 6 have had problem and all features are not included. I don’t want to buy into Adobe’s month by month cloud version of Lightroom as I do photography as a hobby and don’t want that sort of investment so am confused on how to start by purchasing lightroom with a downloaded copy on my PC. Any advice would be helpful. I have been using various other programs until now including Photoshop Elements 14.

As a hobbyist I struggle to see why Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan @ US$10/month (GBP8.57/month here in the UK) is not the best deal, even for those who only dabble occasionally. I know that in the long run it’s more expensive than the standalone products but I can live with an outlay of less than the equivalent of 33 cents a day. And, aside from the Lightroom performance issue and steep Photoshop learning curve, at least it’s revised frequently & automatically and its compatibility kept up-to-date as new cameras and lenses make their appearance.

Ator, that’s a very good point, thanks for letting us know. I ran two separate processes to measure LR performance – one had some adjustments on some images, while others did not. I did notice that images with adjustments took much longer to process, which makes sense. I also did a separate process to convert NEF to DNG without any processing at all, which is what I ended up using for the above results.

So if one does use images with a lot of post-processing, it is safe to assume that it will take a while. Thanks for all the info you have provided, I am sure others will find this useful.

Another LR performance issue that makes me wonder is the Camera RAW cache. I’d expect a cached RAW file to pop up in the Development window in the time it takes to read the file from disk, but it looks to me as if LR renders every photo I select from scratch whether or not it’s in the RAW cache. That’s a lot of waiting while editing. I’ve set my Camera RAW cache to 100GB but the effects seems zero.

I thought the Camera RAW cache is for the Develop window what the rendered previews are for the Library window, an instant popup of the latest result where you left off. Apparently it’s not. Could you tell me if it’s used for something else or is mine just not working?

I have no problems with my archived library of over 45K images. My current library for this year is over 25K. Since I can run the libraries in a managed database rather than a referenced one, this alone is worth the value of Capture 1.

Switching my LR catalogue recently to a new hard drive was a nightmare and valuable waste of time. My Capture 1 was just a copy and away I went working with it, no down time.

I used Lightroom from the same day I could download the V1 beta. However, LR seems to be slow and buggy to a point where I wish I had something else.

I use LR 6.5 and my catalogs as well as my images are on a Samsung 1TB SSD. Downloading a wedding with around 3,000 photos takes around 2.5 hours. Editing is painfully slow and many times the program does not respond for a while. Syncing edits used to be instant, it is now takes 2-3 second per image.

When opening an image in the development module it goes through three “stages” until I can see it in focus. It opens blurry and as an original file, then editing is applied and then it comes into focus. Annoying!

I was having repeated crashes in Photoshop after moving a very, very large multilayer file from Lightroom. I kept trying to figure out how Photoshop could use so much memory. I learned the very obscure approach to clearing memory in Photoshop (alt + Help>aboutphotoshop), and learned and applied “linked smart objects”. All that gave PS more memory and made my file smaller, but the problems remanined. Then, Adobe released their last Lightroom release, within which was some obscure mention of “memory”. Miracle. My Photoshop problems stopped.

I used to own LR4 then LR5, along with the NIK collection and Adobe Elements, but decided to simplify my life and go with DxO Optics Pro (and a one-time purchase amount). Works great for me, although I shoot JPEG and like to spend as little time behind the computer as possible, so my approach may not appeal to some (or most) people. In any event, I doubt Adobe does anything other than push their subscription….the fast processors in computers these days mask software inefficiencies, and most users don’t notice micro differences in software performance as long as the software does the things they care about. I actually think LR5 is a great product and integrates nicely with DxO Optics with a plug-in….I personally did not want to use multiple products, but they work well together to be honest and you can take advantage of features in both packages.

Thanks for taking the time to do this. This lines up well with the feeling I had in moving from LR5 to LR6… “This feels slower, not faster…” In addition I’ve found LR5.7 to be solid as a rock, and LR6 to be somewhat buggy. The latest release, 6.6.1, seems better in this regard. I wish I could just stay with LR5.7, but it doesn’t natively support my Oly EM-5 Mk II raw files, and I’m hesitant to convert everything to .DNG, which while open seems pretty specific to Adobe products.

I’m going to be seriously considering Affinity products once they launch for Windows.

Could you elaborate on exactly what kind of problems you had with Capture One Pro? “I have tried more than 10K images in a Capture One catalog and had problems – I don’t think it can handle everything I have got…” is a little vague. Was it stability, corruption, or performance you were having problems with? Were you importing into a managed or referenced arrangement? Were you running it under Windows or OSX?

I migrated a very modest sized Aperture Library to Capture One in a referenced arrangement and am having zero problems with it. It does take a while to understand Capture One’s approach to cataloging and how to make best use of it. (There are still a few things that need to be improved.) Capture One feels a lot faster than Aperture was, and is very responsive on my 2014 Mac Mini i7 w/SSD editing 38-40 MP 16 bit TIFFS.

It looks like you are averaging 110 to 160 images/day. It seems to me that your biggest challenge may not be software but the human problem of remembering what you actually have.

I’ve done exactly what Richard has done – migrated from Aperture to Capture One Pro (currently use version 9) and added Affinity to my work flow. This is a perfect combination quality and money wise. It covers 99% of my needs. My late 2010 iMac 8GB RAM 27″ is still able to handle it.

When needed, I also use Aurora HDR Pro and Autopano Giga 4. So far so good. I shoot with Oly EM-1 – actually CO work well with it and helps to improve its DR.

As long as Adobe keeps their software subscription-based, I will stay away from them.

Hmm, this website seems to be suffering from serious problems the past couple of days. It’s a mix of no response and/or incomplete rendering, but working sometimes. I just tried posting a comment and I think it probably went into a black hole.

I’ve been using LR since day 1 and I confirm that performance wise LR6 it is a nightmare whereas until version 4, if I recall well, it worked quite smoothly. I have a very decent machine and I think as others have been commenting that Adobe does not care at all about product performance. I will NEVER switch to the subscription model that is for sure.

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